Chicago Blackhawks, American professional ice hockey team based in Chicago. The Blackhawks are part of the “Original Six,” the group of teams that made up the National Hockey League (NHL) from 1942 until the 1967 expansion. They have won six Stanley Cup titles.

Chicago Blackhawks players Jonathan Toews (left) and Dustin Byfuglien battling for the puck in a …

Nam Y. Huh/AP

The team was established in 1926 by Chicago-based businessman Frederic McLaughlin, who was awarded one of the first U.S. expansion franchises by the NHL and subsequently purchased the defunct Portland Rosebuds of the Western Hockey League to form the nucleus of his team. In 1929 the team moved into Chicago Stadium, which was then the largest indoor sporting venue in the world, and it would serve as the team’s home until 1994.

Originally known as the Black Hawks (the spelling was changed to “Blackhawks” in 1986 to match the original NHL paperwork), the team had some early success, with Stanley Cup wins in the 1933–34 and 1937–38 seasons. The second championship was notable because the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup after posting a regular-season record of 14–25, the worst record of any team to go on to win the title (that they were in the play-offs at all owed to the fact that six of the NHL’s eight franchises qualified for the postseason at the time). The Black Hawks returned to the Stanley Cup finals in 1943–44 but were swept in four games by the Montreal Canadiens. They soon entered into the worst stretch of play in team history, finishing every season but two between 1946–47 and 1956–57 at the bottom of the NHL standings.

The 1960s was a period of renaissance for Chicago as squads featuring future Hall of Famers Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Glen Hall, and Pierre Pilote advanced to three Stanley Cup finals and won the franchise’s third title with an underdog win over the Detroit Red Wings to cap off the 1960–61 season. In the 1969–70 season the “Hawks” acquired goaltender Tony Esposito, who would go on to set the franchise record with 418 wins and be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

The 1969–70 season also marked the beginning of 28 consecutive play-off berths for the franchise, the second longest streak of postseason play in NHL history. Over the course of those 28 years, however, the team advanced to just three Stanley Cup finals, losing on each occasion. Despite the team’s failure to capture the Stanley Cup, the streak featured a number of high points. Notably, Mikita, Hull, Esposito, and Keith Magnuson anchored a Black Hawk team that lost a dramatic seven-game Stanley Cup final to a dominant Canadiens team in 1970–71. The Black Hawks returned to the finals two years later, but again they were defeated by Montreal. The team finished atop their division seven times in the 1970s. A franchise tradition began during the 1985 play-offs when Chicago fans—after watching their team get soundly defeated in the first two games of the conference finals by the Edmonton Oilers—cheered loudly during the U.S. national anthem, drowning out the singer; since then all home games, at Chicago Stadium and later the United Center, featured raucous cheering during the national anthem by the home crowd. Chicago added popular players Jeremy Roenick and Ed Belfour in 1988, who then guided the (now single-named) Blackhawks to the Presidents’ Trophy (as the team with the best regular-season record) in 1990–91 and to the Stanley Cup finals in 1991–92, where they lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins in four games.

The team struggled through most of the first decade of the 21st century, as the Blackhawks’ ownership made poor personnel decisions and alienated a large swath of its theretofore loyal fan base. Many observers claimed that—given the team’s long history and the seeming economic advantages of playing in a large metropolis—the Blackhawks were one of the worst franchises in professional sports. But a turnover in team management and savvy personnel moves that infused the team’s roster with young talent—notably centre Jonathan Toews and right wing Patrick Kane—resulted in the Blackhawks’ returning to the play-offs after a five-season absence in 2008–09, and the team advanced to the Stanley Cup finals the following season, where they defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in six games to end a 49-year championship drought. The Blackhawks followed their Stanley Cup win with two straight first-round play-off losses.

In 2012–13 the team won another Presidents’ Trophy by posting the best record in the league during a lockout-shortened campaign, which included an NHL-record 24 consecutive games without a regulation loss to start the season. The Blackhawks advanced to the Stanley Cup finals during the postseason, notably defeating the rival Red Wings along the way in a seven-game conference semifinals series that Chicago trailed three games to one. In the particularly dramatic finals, the Blackhawks defeated the Boston Bruins in six games. Three games went into overtime—including a triple-overtime game one—and the Blackhawks won game six by scoring two goals in the final 1:16 of play to overcome a one-goal deficit. By doing so, they became the first team in NHL history to clinch the Stanley Cup in regulation time after trailing in the deciding game with less than two minutes remaining. The following season the Blackhawks again advanced to the conference finals, where the team faced the Los Angeles Kings in that best-of-seven series for the second consecutive year. However, Chicago’s run of late-in-the-series heroics (the team was undefeated in its previous 13 games five, six, and seven) ended, and the Kings eliminated the Blackhawks in overtime of game seven. The Blackhawks made it to the conference finals for the third consecutive year in 2014–15 and advanced to the Stanley Cup finals by winning a seven-game series against the Anaheim Ducks. Chicago then won a third Stanley Cup in six years, defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning in a thrilling six-game series in which no team had more than a one-goal lead until the final period of play.

The Chicago Blackhawks posing with the Stanley Cup after winning the 2014–15 National Hockey …

MIKE WULF—CSM/Landov

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A professional ice hockey team based in Chicago, Illinois, the Blackhawks play in the Western Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). They are one of the "Original Six," the group of teams that made up the NHL from 1942 until the 1967 expansion. They have won six Stanley Cup championships (1934, 1938, 1961, 2010, 2013, and 2015).